Michael Burleigh's histories of the relationship between politics and religion, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, were among the most acclaimed books of 2005 and 2006, according to the dustjacket of his latest offering. In it, he defines terrorism as "a tactic primarily used by non-state actors ... to create a psychological climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess". He then expresses an intention to proceed not by analysing ideology but by recounting specific actions, following St Matthew's precept, "By their fruits ye shall know them".

So it proves. Normally I might be in favour in starting with particularities, but terrorism is a field in which definition of terms is crucial. One cannot just avoid the issue by going into a corner. It might have helped if "cultural history" were more clearly defined, too. He seems to mean the history of terrorism as a culture or practice, globally and across time, but already that is to involve oneself in the generalism he has eschewed.

A bit more of the other meaning of "a cultural history of terrorism" - that is, the representation of terrorism in culture - might have brought something to the party. There is a wrong-headed analysis of The Secret Agent ("a tale that Conrad invested with little political significance") but no sign of Camus' Les Justes, Sartre's Les Mains Sales, Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, or, coming back to Conrad, the anarchist short stories in A Set of Six. These are necessary texts.

Instead, Camus and Sartre are characterised as modish. Blood & Rage has its own modishness, though, proceeding in sequence through "Green" (the Fenian dynamiters), "Red" (Russian nihilists and revolutionaries) and "Black" (anarchists and terrorists) chapters, before the colour scheme breaks down with "Death in the Sun" (terror and decolonisation), "Attention-Seeking" (Black September and international terrorism), "Guilty White Kids" (the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction), "Small-Nation Terror", and "World Rage" (Islamist terrorism).

Burleigh takes it as a given that states have been responsible for "the most lethal instances" of terrorism but radically limits his discussion of state terror. In other hands it would have been central or part of a duality. Rarely is Britain considered as an instigator of terrorism. This is particularly glaring in his discussion of the relationship between Ireland and Britain, which is unbalanced to the point of perversity.

That is part of a wider problem. Burleigh consistently neglects the "horrible conditions", as Kropotkin put it, which cause some terrorists to act (other than being psychopaths or criminals). He is quite open about ignoring "the structural violence bearing down on desperate people" and he is right that the individual must bear responsibility for strapping on the belt of death. But there is more to it than that. This is where the more nuanced approach of the writers listed above could have helped broaden his education on the subject.

Here, for example, is his summation of how Nelson Mandela came to join the armed wing of the ANC: "The path to violence, largely against inanimate objects rather than people it must be stressed, was paved with the obstacles that apartheid had placed in the way to [sic] the aspirations of the majority." To put it like that suggests apartheid was merely a small hurdle rather than the basic problem. This is to wilfully misunderstand the nature of a cause, both philosophically and politically.

Burleigh's typical procedure is episodic. He jogs along from incident to incident, unpacking them, adding historical depth and noticing the odd connection. Though the lack of an overarching argument is evasive, this makes for a lively book, albeit one driven by a dark, Gothic delight in representing on the page the violence it ostensibly anathematises.

Blood & Rage is strong on 1970s terrorism - Abu Nidal, Carlos the Jackal, the Baader-Meinhof gang, including the odd participation of the Japanese Red Army, "who went to war with Rimbaud poems and small origami dolls in their pockets". His account of Islamist terrorism in the final section is fair, although he is wrong to say that the CIA-funded arm of the Afghan mujahideen moved in different orbits to foreign Islamist fighters such as Osama bin Laden.

It is on the terrorism of decolonisation that he is weak, starting with his refusal to see Irish republicanism as being in the imperial sphere at all. He correctly identifies the goal of the Irish Republican Brotherhood as the "disenthralment" of the Irish race and rightly pinpoints the transformation of British imperial difficulties into Irish opportunities as the policy of these Fenians, as they were known. But he fails to see how the deep link between empire and union (Scottish and Irish) operates.

There is an excessively negative portrayal of the whole idea, feeling and tradition of Irish nationalism. This is something more virulent than mere anti-mysticism, though he particularly attacks the view that the Easter rising "was the blood sacrifice necessary for Ireland's liberation". Is his position that Ireland should have achieved self-determination only through the ballot box?

The story of Ireland's road to freedom is extremely complex. To be Irish is itself a multidimensional experience often involving many centuries of interaction with Britain (my mother's family, one of whom, Robert Barton, signed the 1921 treaty as a Sinn Fein representative, went over as Cromwellian gunsmiths in 1649). Burleigh's totalising picture of slovenly Fenians, and his many other negative comments about the Irish in previous books, let him down. They ruin what was once a considerable reputation.

The sentence that will really raise Irish hackles is one that deals with the police auxiliaries notorious for brutal counter-insurgency methods: "These Black 'n' Tans, named after their mix-and-match combat garb, brought a certain indiscriminate vigour to the conflict that has passed into Irish folklore and that was condemned at the time by senior British statesmen." That is a disgustingly gleeful way of presenting what happened. Even those Irish who are not ultra-nationalist will find it so.